Why Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia Are Still So Bad

King Abdullah's recent announcement that women will be able to vote in 2015 is too little, too late

Saudi King Abdullah at a Shura assembly in Riyadh, where he announced greater political rights for women / Reuters

It tells us much about the modern media and
blogosphere when we get excited about news from Saudi Arabia that
essentially means very little. Can women in Saudi Arabia run for office
in this Thursday's municipal elections? No. Can they vote? No. But
a post-dated political check by an ailing monarch has made global
headlines. And yet, a woman sentenced to ten lashes today in Jeddah for
violating a driving ban has received no media attention (thus far).

King Abdullah, by all accounts a relative reformer,
promised over a decade ago that he would "open all doors for Saudi
women to enable them to make their full contributions to the
nation...which is in great need of them," yet to this day in Saudi Arabia
women cannot work in most sectors. In 1961, the first elementary schools
for girls were opened in Saudi Arabia by King Saud, ushering in an age
of hope that women would be educated, work, and enjoy equal status.
Fifty years later, that promise is yet to be realized.

I lived in Saudi Arabia in 2005, when King Abdullah had recently
taken the throne. He regularly spoke about the need to bring about full
human rights in a country that treats six million foreigners as
modern-day slaves, refuses Christians and Jews places of worship, and
subjects its own women to second-class status. The king's speeches
gained coverage in the western media. But where it mattered, in Friday
prayer gatherings inside the country, conservative clerics would
undermine the king's commitment among the population.

In a city as liberal as Jeddah, I regularly heard Friday sermons at
vast gatherings where the preacher complained that human rights were,
essentially, rights for homosexuals. In a country with a vibrant
underground gay community, that accusation was serious for discrediting
the king's agenda among a wider conservative population. Six years
later, human rights violations in Saudi Arabia remain daily occurrences
(today's court verdict is a case in point).

Based on that track record, such promises of voting in four years'
time carry little weight. If the king were serious, the change could be
made much, much sooner. Moreover, how can women stand in municipal
elections and campaign when it remains illegal for Saudi women to
display their faces in public? Under strict Wahhabist rules, they must
cover their faces in public. The nominal participation of women in
elections is a cosmetic change when Saudi women are still segregated in
public from men, cannot travel without male chaperones inside or outside
of the country, cannot inherit at an equal rate to men, are not allowed
to drive, and remain forbidden from pursuing most occupations.

Voting rights must come within a fuller and more urgent package of
reform in Saudi Arabia. Changing Saudi male and clerical attitudes
towards women helps the kingdom shift its approach towards scripture
from literalism and rigidity to pluralism, depth, and context. This
shift not only helps advance the status of Saudi women and therefore
Saudi Arabia's standing in the modern world, but it will also help heal
the country's many other ailments, including intolerance and extremism.